For me personally, the perfect study space is in the comfort of my own room, where I’m free to follow my own routine and get up whenever needed without having to worry about leaving my things out on the table, all while not getting distracted by others passing by or loud conversations. I know for many of my friends, however, that it is quite the contrary for them. Unable to stay focused at home, other settings give them the motivation to study and keep on track. Once you’re in your final year, you know what works best for you, but in the meantime, there are plenty of spaces to go to if you’re in need of a change in environment while you review your notes for that upcoming midterm.

It’s been almost a month since classes started, summer has come to an end and the mid-term period is upon us. As a first year student, this was about the time of the term where I started to ask myself questions: Did I take the right courses for my degree? Will I enjoy them? Will I do well in them? What if this is not what I want to do at all? While some students know exactly what classes they want to be in and what career path they want to take, for many others, it is not as clear cut.

It is just one month after school starts, but due to the tri-semester system at McGill, we already start to write our first midterms. Usually with only four to six weeks of stuff in our brain, it seems easy to handle, but due to the joy of the first three weeks (aka housewarming parties, reunions with friends, holiday-lag from summer), our machinery has not been tuned to its optimum. (more…)

As a first-year student, you get a lot of advice on how to manage the start of this new chapter of your life. From student handbooks to online resources, many places offer tips and tricks that you can carry on with you throughout your studies and later in life. Things like ‘don’t procrastinate’, ‘eat well’, and ‘get involved on campus’ often make up part of the list of things you can do to both enjoy your university years and be successful, but there’s more!

Here are seven more ways to do well during your first year (and beyond!):

Technology is incredibly convenient in many different ways. It provides an efficient method of long-distance communication, it allows for widespread access to information, and it’s a cool place to share our selfies. But as amazing as technology is, it also can be extremely distracting. Maybe not everyone feels this way, but I know firsthand that technology can be an impediment to productivity. I don’t think I could ever accurately claim that I’ve found a solution to that, but over the last few years I’ve learned some ways to manage technology-related distractions. (more…)

Although the thought of summer break approaching can be the only thing carrying you through winter finals, taking a summer class in Montreal can be a great experience. With its own benefits and drawbacks, taking a class in the summer can be a widely different experience from regular scheduled classes. Here’s what I took away from my first summer class at McGill.

In the past 3 years at McGill University, I have changed my studying strategies. In my first year, I wrote all my notes on paper during class and used the textbook, but did not take advantage of the lecture recordings. My first year classes such as calculus, chemistry, and physics required a lot of doing problems from the textbook. If I missed something while the professor was lecturing, it wasn’t such a big deal. Rarely, I would use the lecture recordings (not rewatch the whole thing) to take a quick look at what I missed if it was important. The only class which was more memorization based was psychology. I would retype my psychology notes I wrote in class and then supplement what I missed with notes from the textbook. My first year worked out pretty well.

Welcome to the last installment of my prep course review series. If you’ve been following my blog in recent months, you know that I’ve already compared prep courses for the MCAT, GMAT and LSAT. Last but not least, we have the Graduate Record Exam, or the GRE. In all honesty, I had never heard of the GRE until a few months ago, which is surprising considering it’s required by most graduate programs in the US and in Canada. With a little more investigation, Magoosh- a prep course company I had yet to come across in this entire series, and Kaplan- a series regular, seemed to be the most highly recommended.

Blog authors are solely responsible for the content of the blogs listed in the directory. Neither the content of these blogs, nor the links to other web sites, are screened, approved, reviewed or endorsed by McGill University. The text and other material on these blogs are the opinion of the specific author and are not statements of advice, opinion, or information of McGill.